Alibaba Cloud is naturally dominant in the locally-dominated Chinese cloud market – but it’s gaining significantly in the rest of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market, according to the latest note from data and analytics firm GlobalData.

APAC cloud services, according to the analyst house, will hit $55.2 billion in 2022 at a CAGR of 27.7%. This will be driven by an ‘insatiable’ trend of product launches by cloud providers drawing on the next wave of cloud services and technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data analytics, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The company adds that Alibaba is ‘a force to be reckoned with’. “Alibaba Cloud is now betting big on some emerging markets such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia while competing with others in developed markets such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Australia,” said Siow Meng Soh, technology analyst at GlobalData.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of Alibaba’s concerted expansion outside of its home base. In August the company launched no fewer than nine products around cloud architecture, machine learning, IoT and security focused on Asia Pacific, having previously announced a second infrastructure zone in Malaysia.

In June, Synergy Research argued Alibaba was already at second position in public cloud in APAC, behind AWS, which leads in every geography. Across the other geographies Alibaba did not threaten the top five – but its APAC positioning gave it fourth position overall.

The GlobalData analysis also notes the importance of partnerships to help achieve greater global footprint.

“With the ongoing migration of IT to the cloud, telecom providers and IT service providers have developed a cloud practice to help customers migrate their workloads, implement hybrid cloud and manage multi-cloud environments,” added Soh. “These providers often partner with top players, particularly AWS and Microsoft Azure, to help customers keen to use the public cloud services.

“Going forward, they need to broaden the list of partners since customers are likely to be using a wider range of cloud services – and Alibaba Cloud should be on the list for consideration.”

Photo source: www.alibabagroup.com

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